Are you Back for Good or Still Shopping Around? Investigating Customers' Repeat Churn Behavior

• DOI: 10.1509/jmr.16.0623
• Publication Date: 2017-12-01T21:24:17Z
• Authors: V. Kumar; Agata Leszkiewicz; Angeliki Herbst
• Keywords: Sample (material); Customer Lifetime Value

Service firms develop win-back strategies to rectify issues that cause customer churn and rebuild relationships with lost customers. To better support retention, it is important understand how the revived relationship evolves possibly ends again. examine customers' repeat behavior, we a “mixture cure-competing risks” model, jointly estimating duration of second lifetimes, multiple reasons for churn, heterogeneity customers in exhibiting related reason. The proposed model tested using data set from large telecommunications provider including information on behavior marketing activities during first lifetimes. We find existence “cured” group returning customers, defined as those who are not susceptible same reason they churned previously. Our findings suggest mitigating can extend lifetime tenure increase profitability by $150,000 over sample (leading gains $15 million deferring second-lifetime customers), depending type churn.